Our June Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman: Christopher Nolan's DUNKIRK

“We shall fight 
on the beaches…..” 
  ...Winston Churchill

Seventy-eight years ago, end-May-into-June 1940, the astonishing rescue of over 338,000 troops took place from the beach and waters of French town ‘Dunkerque‘, boosting the morale of the Nazi-oppressed Allies even in setback. ‘Dunkirk’, oft referred to as battle, was not combat but a reference to the escape of British Expeditionary Forces (BEF) and French troops from certain demise.

Nazi troops had driven a vital chunk of Britain’s fighting force to the shore of the picturesque seaside town where they became sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe and rolling panzer units.

Christopher Nolan’s big film of 2017 now streaming on HBO tells the story— sort of. It’s not your average war tale but rather an escape turned moral victory. From the very first moment, it was a fight to keep breathing rather than to kill enemy, a relentless, terror-filled saga spread out on a canvas of land, sky, sea. Soldiers on the shore, pilots in the air, and small and large boat operators maneuvered to avoid fire. The affair is driven by a Hans Zimmer score that synthesized the echo of the sea, a ticking clock, and the wailing, grinding of metal on metal until the quiet of deliverance came.

Click this link then scroll down to the end to watch a 1940 newsreel describing the event.

Nolan (shown above, right, with crew and actor Fionn Whitehead) designed his film like a composer orchestrating notes and patterns of a symphony into a monumental wave. Someone called the film an impressionist painting; narrow that down to ‘pointillist’: each dot contributing to the whole.

There are plentiful stars here exulting in their anonymity. Kenneth Branagh and James D’Arcy (navel and army commanders) pace the jetty, above.

Tom Hardy flies his small Spitfire muttering into his radio, chasing off German planes firing on boatloads of soldiers. (Nolan describes Hardy, the actor, as ‘master of the small space’, referring to his film Locke.)

Mark Rylance pilots his yacht, Moonstone, one of hundreds responding to Churchill’s call for aid; he rescues shell-shocked Cillian Murphy off a floating mound of metal, and later a downed pilot and dozens of oil-and water-soaked soldiers from the sea. Neither the stars nor the lesser-knowns speak more than a few words and are mostly nameless as characters. The not-personal is the point here; it is immersion in the process that fixes it in your memory long after.

Nolan has memorialized the symphony in a way a more storied version doesn’t. (A chapter in Foyle’s War is fine fiction, tying the family situation of a small boat owner to the larger event — it’s a good yarn like every chapter in that series, but not so as to imprint on your mind the enormity of this singular event.) You have few personal lives and no plot to remember, just the tortured struggle of thousands conveying across the Channel; but you will know forever what luck it was, including buying time for Pearl Harbor to instigate America into the war theater. You will have lived it.

Nolan’s pains to take you there included filming at Dunkirk and using original WWII equipment (including Spitfires and original vessels — see the brilliant video at end comparing the film to archival footage).

In addition to (from left, above) Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, and Kenneth Branagh are memorable cameos of relative newcomers Fionn Whitehead, as the virtual lead, (musician) Harry Styles, Tom Glynn-Carney, and a second pilot, Jack Lowden; also more seasoned performers as Brian Vernel, Barnard Aneurin, Harry Richardson, and Barry Keoghan.

To fill in the historical blanks, online sites like History.com offer much more detail than is summarized here: On May 10, 1940, Germany launched its lightning war or Blitzkrieg across the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, France. Once in France, the German army pushed toward the English Channel, by end May driving several hundred-thousand Allied troops onto the beach of Dunkirk.

Winston Churchill had just replaced “the appeaser,” Neville Chamberlain, as Prime Minister. The new PM accepted the rescue idea reluctantly (“wars are not won by evacuations”), but Dunkirk was six miles from Belgium (already lost) and German panzers were bearing down on Dunkirk itself. Churchill feared “a colossal military disaster…the whole root and core and brain of the British Army about to perish or be captured”.

For disputed reasons, Hitler, paused the attack on May 24. (Herman Goering asserted, for instance, that the Luftwaffe would stop evacuation from the air.) The small delay gave the Brits enough time to organize the removal before the German army resumed its advance to Dunkirk on May 26. The Luftwaffe made evacuation a terror but not impossible — cloud cover and fires caused by the bombing of oil storage depots decreased pilot visibility. (Below, archival photo)

The Dunkirk beach was too shallow for boats to land, leading Churchill to ask the public for small crafts to cross the channel and aid the rescue. He hoped 45,000 men might be saved, but Hitler’s brief delay changed the calculus. According to varied estimates, 400-1000 pleasure yachts, fishing boats, channel ferries, and motor rescue lifeboats answered the call, risking mines, bombs, torpedos, and Luftwaffe air attack on the water.

On May 26, 7500 made it off the beach; on May 27, twice that. May 28th brought the armada of ‘little ships’ spread out across the horizon provoking a great roar from the soldiers massed on shore and a singular moment of joy Nolan permits the viewer. By May 30th, one hundred thousand more had been evacuated.

Killed, wounded, and captured Allies numbered 68,111; 243 ships were destroyed, and many thousands were left behind along with heavy tanks, guns, motorcycles, ammunition, and fuel. On June 4, German troops occupied Dunkirk. But by then, another 78,000 had made their exodus — 198,000 British and 140,000 French soldiers for a total rescue of 338,226. Churchill called it “a miracle of deliverance”. (Like the luck of the Maccabees, three day’s oil lasted for eight.) Below, Harry Styles gets a beer through the window on the train ride home.

After Dunkirk the German army swept France, capturing Paris on June 14. By end June, the British faced Germany entirely alone. Not until D-day, June 1944, and the U.S. landing at Normandy (200 miles south of Dunkirk), did the liberation of Europe begin. Christopher Nolan has said that if the evacuation had not succeeded, Great Britain would have been obliged to capitulate, the Germans would have conquered Europe, the U.S would not have joined the war. He called it a decisive moment in the history of the world.

I am not much of a Nolan fan except for Memento and The Prestige, but here he succeeds in making Dunkirk come alive as a particular moment in history.

Hitler declared it a major defeat but Churchill knew otherwise. He leveraged its morale-saving value in a famous speech to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. Nolan ends his film with a newspaper handed through a train window to Fionn Whitehead who haltingly reads out the PM’s famous last paragraph, here excerpted:

 “Even though…many old and famous States have fallen…we shall not flag or fail. We shall go to the end…we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches…we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…until in God’s good time the New World with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.” 

Churchill meant us in a time when we were good and did right.

NOTE: See the comparison between archival footage and Nolan’s imagery.

The above post was written by our 

monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman.

GENERATION WAR: Kolditz/Kadelbach's look at WWII German youth opens at NYC's Film Forum

First things first: GENERATION WAR, the lengthy new German entertainment that opens in New York City tomorrow at Film Forum is television. However, it is not American television but the European variety (specifically German), which raises it a few notches above what we get over here from our major networks. (Our cable channels are another matter.) Four-and-one-half hours long, the "movie" is shown in two parts, the second of which is by far the stronger. The first part, while it draws you in somewhat, seems a bit too fraught with both coincidence and the kind of predictable events that television loves so well. The longer second section is where the growth and change most occur, in which the characters deepen, events coalesce, the noose tightens and finally closes.

The subject here is also telling, and it must have been even more so for the German populace (it was an enormous success in Germany, in the manner, I am guessing, that both our own Roots and Holocaust series took American television by storm), for it involves five young friends (shown above) in the Berlin of 1941 -- kids, really -- as Hitler's war rages at its fullest, when it looks to many, and not just to Germans, as though the Fuhrer might indeed win his campaign and, with Italy and Japan at his side, conquer the world.

As written by Stefan Kolditz (shown at left) and directed by Philipp Kadelbach (shown bleow), along with the very big budget, the program looks quite good in terms of period, decor, costumes and all the rest. And because the cast, in both leading and supporting roles is made up of faces that most Americans will not know or have previously seen, rather than those of big-name stars (à la the current Butler movie), this lends the series another coat of veracity.

Because two of our five friends are soldiers and one of the two women is a nurse at the Russian front, Generation War is indeed a "war movie" for much of its length, and as such is a pretty good one.

The strangest thing for most Americans will be to experience this war from the German side, as the movie allows us to do. This forces us to identify with and to some extent root for these young people, and the effect is odd and disturbing. Add to all this the disturbances felt by the main char-acters as everything they know and have been taught starts to fall apart, and you have the makings of some-thing richly provocative and equally unsettling -- as well as something that we in American almost never get to see. Nor, I wager, have they seen this much in Germany. "What did you do in the war, Gramps and Granny?" is a question probably asked in Deutschland rather more often since the airing of Generation War.

The series moves back and forth from Germany to Russia and Poland, from the fighting to the hospital (above) to the Berlin homes of the Germans, and because one of our five friends is a Jew, we see antisemi-tism raise its ugly head in ways small and huge -- in all three countries (the Poles seem to hate the Jews every bit as much as do the Germans).

There are four tales going on simultaneously here. The first involves the two soldiers -- who are also brothers -- one a gung-ho hero type (Volker Bruch, above, right), the other (Tom Schilling, above, left ) a retiring, intellectual who wants nothing to do with fighting. Both change drastically over the course of the story.

The girl who loves the older brother and works as a nurse at the hospital on the Russian front is played quite well by Miriam Stein (above). Her story -- which takes a happy, healthy pro-Nazi into situations that will test her decency and leave her bereft -- is in some ways the most interesting and original of the bunch.

The other two characters are the young woman (Katharina Schuttler, above, right, and below) who wants a musical career -- which she gets, in spades -- and her boyfriend, Viktor (Ludwig Trepte, above, left), whom she tries to save via the sleazy Nazi official she uses to both further her career and save her lover. (Interestingly, it's the Nazi who ends up in the catbird seat, as happened, post-war, with so many of these killers.)

Ironies, big and small, pile up over the course of the series, leading to a dark, angry finish, in which our sweet kids, below, not yet even 25, have turned into empty husks. Those who are still alive, at least.

Generation War, from Music Box Films, opens tomorrow at Film Forum in New York City, and in the weeks to come will open in at least nine more cities across the country. You can see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters buy clicking here and then clicking on THEATERS halfway down the screen.

DVDebut: Jang Hun's THE FRONT LINE -- Korea's choice for Foreign-Language Oscar

Making its USA east coast debut this past January as the opening attraction of the Korean Cultural Service's 2012 film series, this knock-out of a war movie is not to be missed by anyone interested in war films, anti-war films (of which it is one of the best) and especially the war that separated Korea into two countries back in the early 1950s. THE FRONT LINE -- directed by Jang Hun and written by Park Sang-yeon -- opened briefly in New York for a (very) limited theatrical run during the week of its KCS debut and then arrived on DVD last month, which is the format in which TrustMovies has finally caught up with it. The film, South Korea's submission for last year's Best Foreign Language Film, though it did not even make the short list, most definitely, in the words of another Oscar winner, "shoulda been a contender."

The filmmaker, shown at left, serves up a good and gritty mix of well-drawn characters against a vast, horrific canvas of war. Full of incident and filmed spectacularly well, the movie works equally as adrenaline rush and a quiet, consideration of how this war "worked," from headquarters downward. A North Korean spy is suspected of infiltrating the South's front line, and so a certain Lieutenant Kang (Shin Ha-kyun, below, left) is sent there to ferret out whatever information he can via his old friend, Lieutenant Kim (Ko Soo, below, right), who is also at the front.

The USA is seen here only as airplanes that fly over the hills and bomb them, after which the soldiers from the south scramble up and down those hills trying to kill the soldiers of the north. As one of these men explains, they take the hill, lose it, take it again, lose it again, and on and on without end. This has resulted in certain soldiers from one army burying a little treasure (food, liquor, chocolates, whatever) to have when they return to that hill, as they know they must. The other army finds this, leaves it own nasty "message," but then, eventually, the two are actually "communicating" -- even, in fact, gifting -- each other.

It's this thread of the "buried treasure" more than any other -- it also, by the by, explains the "spy" situation -- that carries the film along, providing much of its irony and sentiment. It becomes almost iconic to the the situation of this particular war -- equal parts humorous and heart-breaking. The director excels at creating genuine sentiment, especially in one scene involving two children, an old injury and a question of "healing." Instead of milking this for undue tears, the director and writer use it to unveil more fully the clashing character of the lieutenants.

The film grows into something both spectacular and hideous, complete with a surprising sniper, who is picking off the platoon all too easily. The climax, it turns out, is not that. No: There's something far worse in store, and by the time the credits roll, all the deadly absurdity, the shocking waste of this entire situation is brought home about as well as I've seen it done.

The Front Line, 133 minutes, from Wellgo USA Entertainments, is available now, for sale or rental, on DVD only -- no Blu-ray -- but I must say that the transfer is pretty much impeccable. Those of us with Blu-ray should not mind at all watching a DVD of this quality.

Disappointment of the Year: Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

How glad is TrustMovies that he waited for DVD and didn't waste any of his slowly disappear-
ing savings by rush-
ing to the theater to view Quentin Tarantino's tiresome INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS? Very. But now, having seen 1-1/2 hours of it on DVD (yep: he skipped the last hour and went back to blogging: time better spent), he admits he is flummoxed as to what all the fuss is/was about.

Starting at the beginning, with the scene between the French dairy farmer and the naughty Nazi, we get it, we know what's going to happen, and then we just wait. And wait. Past surprise, past suspense, past humor, past caring. Later, when we see both the Nazi and the escaped Jewess together again in the same scene, do we really have to be reminded of what happened earlier? Does Mr. Quentin, shown at right, believe his audience is that dumb?

I guess so.

Scenes like this first one -- lengthy, drawn out talk-fests during which we are reminded of things we already know -- keep happening over and over: the cute-meet via ladder, the restaurant into which every noted Nazi in Paris appears, the secret meeting at the how-come-it's-in-a-basement? bar (shown above). And then there is Brad Pitt (below), giving the absolute worst performance I have ever seen from this OK-to-sometimes-very-good (Burn After Reading) actor: one-note, one-expression, with the accent on the accent, an insult to himself and his viewers.

Take away the needless repetition and all the visual and verbal movie references from Inglourious Basterds and that first 90-or-so minutes that I watched might have been paired down to a swift and decent hour. Of course we expect and get over-the-top violence from Mr. Quentin: Here it's scalping, clubbing-to-death, various shoot-outs and the finger-in-the-leg-wound (kinda paltry, really, but I'm not complaining). Well, I am complaining, but not about the violence. Rather it's the film-making in general. This self-bred auteur seems to have lost not just his edge but his overall ability to tell what's funny (or dramatic, suspenseful, and/or necessary) from what's not.

The writer/director does gets points for casting international stars like Mélanie Laurent, Diane Kruger, Christoph Waltz and Daniel Brühl (shown, right). But the praise heaped upon the cinematography and sets seems a tad over-the-top. You'll find more creativity and the right "look" from Paris 36 than anything I saw in those first 90 minutes. I'll probably finish the film someday. I've certainly seen worse this year. But nothing as over-hyped, over-rated and obvious. I realize that I am in the great minority on this one. Over the years I've run hot and cold on the work of this particular filmmaker, enjoying some films (or parts of them), disliking others. Until now, however, I had never found myself bored.

Inglourious Basterds makes its DVDebut today -- available for purchase or rental.